How Today’s Show Boomeranged into the GOP’s Limbaugh Problem

RUSH: We’ll go to Tampa. This is Charles, been on hold for quite a while. I appreciate it. Thank you much for waiting.

CALLER: Hi, Rush. God bless you and your staff, sir.

RUSH: Thank you, sir.

CALLER: I think we have no compromise whatsoever. Send Democrats to the pits of hell as far as I’m concerned.

RUSH: How you do that?

CALLER: Well, you shred the health care bill, facsimile of the health care bill in a shredder on national TV. You make the Bush tax cuts permanent. You ease small business taxes, secure our border with troops and law enforcement, and make the Democrats a small blip in the annals of history.

RUSH: All right, cool, fine and dandy. I just wanted you to specify the issues, because when you say you want to consign some people to hell, people might get the wrong idea about that. So thank you for spelling that out. He’s right on the money when it comes to the issues. Here’s the bottom line for you Republicans. If you control the House, there shouldn’t be any legislation Obama wants, none, zero, zip, zero, nada. If you control the House and if you’re the opposition, there’s not one thing that he should agree with that you propose. And if there is, it’s a problem. ‘Okay, Rush, well, what happens if they propose a Social Security fix that doesn’t require tax increases?’ Well, I gotta see more than that before I can respond to something like that.

There’s enough going on here that leads me to believe that there is an effort not to understand what the Tea Party’s about. There’s enough going on that leads me to believe that they don’t really want to understand or deal with the issues that are going to result in Republican victory. It’s going to be hard work, roll up your sleeves every day to roll this stuff back. It’s going to be hard work because these people are not going to stop. Obama’s not gonna stop. (interruption) Believe in the big tent. Yeah, I guess if you mean by big tent, moderates and pro-choicers in there and all that, but the problem with their big tent is they don’t want the Tea Party in it. The problem with the Republican big tent is they don’t want the Tea Party in it ’cause the Tea Party isn’t sophisticated enough. They haven’t read the right books. They haven’t been to the right universities or what have you.

Diane in Sarasota, Florida, hi, and welcome to the EIB Network. Nice to have you with us.

CALLER: Thank you very much, Rush. What I’m calling about, my husband and I are beginning members of the Tea Party, and we certainly do not want compromise, and I don’t want to hear reaching across the aisle anymore. But I’m also suspicious of Politico.com. I just wonder if there’s some plan possibly out of the White House or amongst the media to put some doubts in our minds that we’re not going to have as much control, try to split the Republican Party —

RUSH: Well, wait —

CALLER: — try to make us vote third party.

RUSH: There’s no question that two weeks before an election the media does stories that are designed to deflate you and us and to try to tamp down our enthusiasm and so forth, and there’s no question that there’s an element of that in this story. However, I’m just going to tell you that I have talked to Republicans, Diane, who have said to me, ‘We’re not going to have control. We’re not going to have that much power.’ I have talked to Republicans who have asked me to pass on to you, ‘Don’t have all these high expectations.’ I have talked to them, so The Politico is not entirely wrong. I think that the timing of the story is exactly as you say. It’s designed to depress turnout. It’s going to do just the opposite. It’s going to ramp up turnout.

CALLER: Oh, I hope so.

RUSH: Oh, don’t doubt it.

CALLER: And also we in the Tea Party, we don’t stop in 2010. That’s just the beginning and we’re gonna hold all of those Republicans responsible to stop what has happened over the last two years, and even what happened before that. We’re not going away.

RUSH: It’s not just Republicans. It’s Washington.

CALLER: Absolutely. And we want to reverse it, it’s been going on for a very long time but it’s much worse under Obama. But again, I don’t trust anything that comes out of Politico.com. Mike Allen that started it, as you know, started from the Washington Post and TIME Magazine, and he’s to the left of Lenin, and I hear him on the radio, and he’s still a big Obama supporter and a big Obama administration supporter. So that’s why I just wanted to say I don’t believe these polls because I don’t believe anything comes out of that publication.

RUSH: All right, Diane. Thanks for the call. Appreciate it. I know that The Politico thinks they’re throwing cold water. That’s what they’re trying to accomplish, right? They’re trying to throw cold water. The problem is that Americans are so boiling mad that there ain’t enough cold water to throw on us. They’re not gonna tamp down the election turnout, and they’re not gonna tamp down expectations. It’s just gonna add to the volume. All the cold water they throw is just gonna add to the whole volume of water that’s boiling, all the effervescence that’s boiling out there, plain and simple.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Yeah, I’m looking at the audio sound bite roster. It’s such a great sound bite roster today, but, as is always the case, and I explain to people — I had some people in watching the show last week, and they said, ‘How do you prepare this?’ I gave them the prep schedule and so forth, but I said, ‘Basically this is improv. There’s no producer and there’s no script, and there’s nothing I have to do at X ’cause somebody’s expecting it like it is on television. And we don’t do retakes, and it just flows.’ And today is a great example. We got a great audio sound bite roster and I haven’t gotten but two sound bites of it, maybe even one, Christine O’Donnell, and she wasn’t even on the original one. So I don’t know. I’m gonna keep today’s sound bite roster for tomorrow and incorporate it with whatever we have tomorrow that I don’t know about yet.

Meanwhile, in Washington there will be meetings conceived this afternoon and tonight about the Limbaugh Problem; that we deal with the Limbaugh Problem. So there’s a lot happening here that we have to deal with on the fly as it happens.

From The Politico: ‘Early Vote a Bad Omen for Harry Reid — In Nevada’s prime swing county, Republicans are significantly outpacing Democrats in early-voting turnout, according to official statistics — a potential sign of difficulty for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid as he attempts to rally his base for his tough contest with Republican Sharron Angle.’ Now, we’ll see. I’m sure the fraud and cheating has also begun out there. There’s a story I also have in the stack that early voting all over the country, white males are showing up in droves, which you know how that’s going to be portrayed, and of course isn’t it profiling to notice this?

Columbia, South Carolina. Hi, Jack. Welcome to the Rush Limbaugh program. Nice to have you with us.

CALLER: Bipartisanship is what got us into this mess, and partisanship is the only thing that’s gonna get us out. When we started busting our morals and going against the Constitution — this country has taken a downward turn and I’m ready for some partisanship. I’m ready for some good knuckle banging in the Senate and House and overturning all these social programs that are leading us straight to communism. We need to go back to capitalism and we need to go back to the Constitution. Those guys were smarter than we are, and if it’s not in there why are we doing it?

RUSH: Well, it’s clear that there are a lot of things that need to be on the agenda. House rules are not one of them. Stopping the spending is. We don’t need debate. There’s a great way to put it. Why do we need to debate these guys? The debate is the election, and it’s going to be solved. Hell, these guys aren’t even running on their agenda. How in the world do you debate these clowns? They aren’t even running on their agenda. The Democrats are not out there saying, ‘Reelect us, look what we did for you.’ They’re running away from it. How in the world you gonna debate these people? These people are made to order right now to be defeated. Like Obama says, ‘We need to get ready for hand-to-hand combat.’ That’s what he said this was going to be. He’s not moving in our direction.

The debate is over. The Democrats will not even show up. The Democrats, they’re having to buy ’em off. In Cincinnati there’s a story today that they’re taking kids out of school on field trips, high school kids and giving them cupcakes and cookies and teaching them how to vote Democrat. Yeah, it’s somewhere buried in the stack here. I got a whole show we didn’t get to today. This show boomeranged off of essentially two stories today. The Politico story about how the Republicans are really not crazy about repealing stuff and the second story is how Republicans realize they’re going to have to compromise. So basically two stories. The debate’s over. The Democrats will not show up, pure and simple. I mean look at the debates they’re having. They have to have seven or eight other people on the stage with them and they call it a debate. As Obama said, this is what elections are for. Elections solve the debate, and that’s what’s going to happen two weeks from today.